Flashes of Inspiration

FLASHES OF INSPIRATION

Starting points in a creative process might be thought of as flashes of inspiration. You might argue about whether they really exist or not, but I have definitely had moments that I would describe like that. Perhaps it would be less melodramatic to call them an “idea”. Where do ideas come from?

Art and music are perhaps the most obvious places where this might happen. I am neither a prolific composer nor a prolific artist, but I have written various pieces of music in my life (some of which I quite like) and made some art of which I’m genuinely proud. In each case, some ideas have just sort of occurred to me. I have no idea where they came from. Some of the music is in the form of songs that I wrote after I read a poem and music just floated into my brain with the poem. That is not logical. There are “logical” ways to develop music, and great composers have many of these techniques at their fingertips. It can be to do with thematic development, harmonic structure, polyphony where different “voices” are introduced with themes wrapping around one another. Some composers, famously Bach and Schoenberg, used symmetry to transform parts of their composition into new but related music. Unfortunately as a composer I am adept at none of these techniques, so I can only wait for music to float into my brain. This probably explains why I am not very prolific, and why all the pieces I write are rather short.

The rules Bach followed when he was writing harmony were very strict, but that still left him plenty of artistic choices to make within the constraints of those rules. Similarly the rules in sport still leave infinitely many possible outcomes within the rules. The structural rules for Shakespeare’s sonnets are quite restrictive but there is still a huge amount of scope for choices and expression while following those rules. The rules narrow down what is allowed, but the rules alone do not determine how the sonnet will go.

Maths is another area where flashes of inspiration often start us off. Chapter 8 discusses the non-logical processes involved in thinking up a mathematical proof. Once we have an idea, we use logic to test and establish it. We can also start with an instinctive feeling about a situation and try to uncover the reasoning behind it, rather than simply declaring opinions to be “facts”.